Monday, July 6, 2015

Egypt Destroys 1.5 km Smuggling Tunnel Near Rafah

Egyptian forces on Saturday discovered and destroyed a 1.5 kilometer smuggling tunnel beneath the Gazan border, the Egyptian army said. Egyptian security sources told Ma'an that the tunnel was found by Egyptian border guards in the Dayniya area south of Rafah. They said that eight sacks of explosive TNT material and a half-ton of C-4 -- another explosive material -- had been found inside the tunnel. Both the tunnel and the explosive material were destroyed by the army... [The Ma'an editors seem to have no problem headlining the story as being about a smuggling tunnel, and casually including a reference to colossal quantities of explosives. ]

The following comment is cross posted from bloggist "This Ongoing War" http://tinyurl.com/nzgpoym  

Bottom line: there's no problem securing enough cement in today's Gaza to construct a 1.5 kilometer long, underground cement tube, if you're Hamas. And if ordinary Gazans can't get their hands on cement, it's because that's the way Hamas wants it to be.

And why, looking at the world through Islamist terrorists' eyes, would you want it to be any different?: keep the stuff to yourself to build your own aggressive capabilities, and keep the reporters and photographers busy chronicling the suffering of cement-challenged ordinary folk. Win/win, it's called.

A Bloomberg report last summer ["
Gaza's Next Disaster: No Cement for Rebuilding", July 31, 2014] quoted estimates that every one of the scores of Hamas tunnels on Gaza's periphery "required 350 truckloads of building supplies". A previously uncovered Hamas tunnel on the scale of the one just destroyed was estimated by IDF sources quoted in a Washington Post article ["How Hamas uses its tunnels to kill and capture Israeli soldiers"] a year ago to have taken about two years of work, $10 million of capital, and some 800 tons of concrete. In a different world, that could have produced a substantial number of new homes, medical clinics and upward-facing lives.

By the way, did Friday's report of the massive concrete-lined Hamas tunnel found and destroyed along with the explosive materials stored inside it, make it to the news reports in your community?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Certainly not in NZ! We did however have the usual TV news programme showing the plight of the children in the Gaza area, due of course, to the terrible bombing of civilians by the Israeli's. On the inside page of our top newspaper The Herald, on the world news page , at the very bottom, was an inch wide reference to the fact that ISIS had slaughtered 280 Christians etc. So what's new!!!

Haifa Diarist said...

You may be interested to read the latest blog about the lies and deceptions of Amnesty international on the subject of "bombing civilians"